When a telephone call is initiated, one person, customarily referred to as a “calling party,” causes a connection to be made to the telephone of a second person or the “called party.” When the called party is not available, the calling party can leave a message for the called party. This message may be in the form of voice mail.
Unified messaging service providers such as uReach™, Onebox™, and Portico™, available at www.ureach.com, www.onebox.com, and www.portico.net, respectively, offer services that include providing web-based access to voice mail. The uReach™ service also provides for a pager alert when a voice mail is received. However, known unified messaging services suffer from two significant limitations. The unified messaging services require a user to acquire an additional telephone number, rather than using a traditional telephone-service customer's existing telephone number. Additionally, none of the known unified messaging systems have the ability to provide information about voice mail via an instant messaging system.
According to its website at www.evoice.com, eVoice, Inc. of Menlo Park, Calif. offers services including voice mail. In a white paper entitled, “Voicemail-Market Opportunities,” eVoice describes a voice mail system that accepts calls that have been forwarded due to a busy condition or the non-occurrence of an answer event. Known systems, such as that described by eVoice provides an Internet Call Waiting (“ICW”) service that alerts a user to the occurrence of a call event when the user is currently using the user's telephone line for dial-up Internet access. The eVoice white paper also describes Internet service providers (“ISP”) and the use of instant messaging. The white paper states “eVoice enhanced messaging, IM and Internet Call Waiting capabilities can provide a compelling product for these ISPs and portals which should allow them to bypass the local phone companies.”
Therefore, there is a need in the art for providing voice mail alerts from within a voice network via instant messaging on a data network without the need for additional add-on services, such as eVoice.